The interest in online learning has skyrocketed during the pandemic, giving a boost to startups that develop education tech.
Among them is Ukrainian online tutoring platform Preply that has attracted $35 million amid the coronavirus crisis to hire more staff, invest in advertising and enter new markets, company’s chief executive Kirill Bigai announced on March 9.
“I’m proud of our team who have been working relentlessly over the last years to make Preply the largest marketplace for online language tutoring,” he said in the statement.
The money came from U.S. investment funds Full In Partners and Owl Ventures, cofounder of Booking.com Arthur Kosten, cofounder of popular game development platform Unity Technologies David Helgason and other U.S. and European firms that invest in tech companies.
“(This investment) is an opportunity to continue impacting the world we live in. Word by word. Language by language. Life by life,” said Olya Panivnyk, vice president of people at Preply.
This investment came just a year after Preply attracted $10 million from international funds, which believed that the demand for the service would grow as people started to spend more time online.
Last March, Preply had 2 million booked lessons and 10,000 verified tutors, but now — during the global coronavirus pandemic — the platform has over 10 million booked lessons and 40,000 people across 180 countries.
The company’s largest market is the United States, where Preply generates one-third of its revenue. The demand has also spiked in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain — the countries that were among the first last year to close schools in a response to the rapid spread of the coronavirus.
Prior to the quarantine measures, online learning was already on the rise, but during the quarantine, “it attracted a new type of customers who otherwise may not have made the shift to online so soon,” Justin Wiggins, executive assistant of the Preply CEO, said in an interview with the Kyiv Post earlier in August.
Other language learning platforms, including U.S. Duolingo, U.K. Busuu and German Babbel, have also seen an increase in the number of users during the pandemic.
Bigai told U.S. media TechCrunch that he doesn’t compare his startup to the industry’s heavyweights like Duolingo because his company uses different learning methods.
Preply uses artificial intelligence to find tutors depending on students’ schedules, interests and learning goals. Compared to Duolingo that uses flashcards, games and stories to teach a language, Preply believes that students have to speak with real people to hone their skills.
“Our customers think that our way of learning a foreign language is much more effective than language learning apps,” Bigai said.
Besides, Babbel users can learn only 13 languages, Duolingo users — 37, but Preply users can learn over 50, including rare languages like Icelandic, Tibetan and Catalan.
Today the company employs 250 people from 36 countries but wants to double its staff with the help of the new investment. Preply has offices in Kyiv and Barcelona and plans to open the office in the U.S.
The company doesn’t share its revenue figures, but Bigai said that it could be profitable if it wanted to be, sacrificing growth.
Bigai on March 9 wrote in his blog that his company wants to grow further because online learning is not going away anytime soon. According to him, the online language learning market will reach $21 billion by 2024.
Ukrainian investors are proud of Preply’s success.
“This is a story of determination and fight,” said Dan Pasko, managing partner at Diligent Capital Partners, the fund that has invested in the startup several times.
Pasko said that the company first struggled to come up with a successful idea, earned very little and were close to collapse. “But the team has revived, retained the investors’ trust and survived,” Pasko said.
Preply’s users seem to like the platform, too.
“I have been using Preply for a while,” said Ukrainian economist Natasha Mueller on Facebook. “It was the first thing that showed up in the Google search for ‘Spanish teacher online.’ I had no idea until today that it was a Ukrainian platform. So awesome.”
